Galloping the Extra Mile

While being stuck in the evening Kuala Lumpur traffic, one might spot a few luggage bags atop Grab vehicles, almost as if someone was unfortunate enough to have forgotten his travel baggage while exiting his ride-hailing vehicle. Thankfully though, it is nothing of the sort but rather an ingenious Out Of Home (OOH) marketing strategy pioneered by Rodeo.

Founded by Valens Subramaniam, Rodeo is an on-demand ad-tech company that utilizes multiple transportation modes such as cars, motorcycles, and lorries to carry branding from advertisers that it engages with. Once perceived as a financial liability and depreciating assets, cars and other forms of vehicles are now a new way of generating a passive income in a mutually benefitting partnership with Rodeo.

What Rodeo brings to the table is a fresh new take on OOH for advertisers; their featured ads on any of Rodeo’s vehicles can be monitored and Rodeo provides a competitive edge against its competitors by flexibly catering to their clientele’s budget of any size and scale. Rodeo also provides a “swarm” feature where a fleet of vehicles will congregate on a location at a fixed time and date to promote concentrated brand awareness.

Formally trained as an architect, Valens stands out among the advertising folks in the media industry. It was his quick thinking and ability to adapt to a challenging environment that helped him through the dot-com bubble. Now, he’s spearheading Rodeo’s journey to scaling up and venturing into other countries.

Rodeo is currently present in Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Africa. Armed with a compact yet impactful team of 10 employees and Malaysia’s 29 million vehicles on the road as his potential moving billboard as well as consumers for his clients, Valens envisions an expansion into neighboring countries. As he puts it, “If you stop learning and advancing, you’ll die to stand” and Rodeo is indeed advancing into becoming the face of Malaysia’s advertising future.